


Thallium

by elijah_was_a_prophet



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Introspection, Other, Post-Canon, Roadtrip, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 12:27:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19334506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elijah_was_a_prophet/pseuds/elijah_was_a_prophet
Summary: All of you together are EVA’s body, and each of you is a part of it.Asuka had never been her mother's daughter.





	Thallium

Asuka is still sick after Shinji leaves. Her first clue is a wave of intense nausea. Her second is vomiting bile into the red ocean. It smells like menstrual blood and amniotic fluid and the salty slickness of arousal. She lays back on the sand, still retching, and blinks her eye away from the floating patch of puke.

The sky is still a hazy purple. It’s weird, seeing the ocean not reflect the sky like a gently waving mirror. Asuka used to love the ocean before Gaghiel. Now it’s contaminated. Filthy. Sickly warm and sticky like the bathtub she lay in after that ray of light. Both times, then, was Asuka in the stench of menses.

In the bathtub she wanted to die.

Under the ocean she wanted to have never existed in the first place. 

But when Shinji tried to kill her, he gave up and Asuka didn’t care. Let her live. Maybe in some grand scheme she deserved to suffer. Not dying is easier anyways, and in the back of her head suicide is still a coward’s way out. Asuka died years ago anyways.

Her being dead is the only plausible explanation for why she hasn’t done anything but watch the sky. By day the sun vaguely sets and rises behind the purple cotton clouds. And by night the moon is a huge pale breast in the sky, with replica lances and mass-produced EVAs forming a cancerous spider web across its bottom left. Lilith/Rei/Tabris/Kaworu must have hung them there. 

At her best estimates she’s laid on the beach for two days. There’s nothing to distract her from her body- no humans, no EVAs, no constant buzzsaw cicadas. Her plugsuit is torn and filling with sand. The space where her eye used to be aches, as does her right hand. There’s a collection of tiny shiny minnow scars over her heart from where the spears hit and thin pink ones on her wrists from the bathtub incident. She’s memorized every freckle on the tops of her arms and every clear hair on her legs. Only one nail has been left unchewed.

Asuka is dizzy from all these details. She’d vomit again but her stomach has been empty since she crawled from the sea. It’s only mouthfuls of acid and bile.

Tokyo-3 mocks her in the distance. Its jagged ruins stab into the heavens like an affront to- not God, no, but an affront to something. When Instrumentality happened the NERV cavern collapsed, then flooded with the LCL of all the crazy bastards who hadn’t left and the U.N. forces. All of those bastards are in the lake floating and totally happy with it. 

Asuka isn’t weak like them. She wants to live, now. She fought her way out of the mass mind hell into being again and she’s never going to be weak again. She’s an adult and a survivor and she’s not going to lay down and die like she wanted to so many times before. 

Asuka sits up and screams at the motionless red sea. 

When she blinks, she feels hot tears leaking out of her eye. It’s the first clear water that’s fallen since the world ended.

Asuka finds out her feet can still hurt. She walks along one of the few remaining roads, acquiring small cuts and scrapes from the debris that lay uncollected. There are overturned cars, busted light posts, massive holes where skyscrapers had been broken from their bases and fallen into the NERV base.

She realizes that Hikari was probably in one of those shelters. Her sisters had left weeks ago, but poor innocent Hikari had refused to leave her father’s side until what had been set in motion was completed.

The girl had been good to Asuka- unselfish, not so caught up in her own personal petty dramas to reach out a hand. She’d let Asuka play video games until her eyes crossed, sitting on the futon next to her, urging udon and onigiri into Asuka’s cramped hands. Her only odd behavior had been using “boku” when her father wasn’t home, her chest squeezed under an impossibly tight bra and obscured by her father’s baggy button-down shirt. 

“I feel more comfortable this way, Asuka-chan.” she said while doing up buttons. “When we were kids, I used to swap clothes with Toji-kun. But then his mom gave him an earful and he started wearing sweats.”

“Ehh, whatever.” Asuka had said. “Hey, how the fuck do you get the star in the snow level? The damn penguin keeps beating me.” Pen-Pen squawked from the freezer, which had made Hikari laugh.

Asuka, looking down into a hole where a building once hung, wonders if Pen-Pen had a soul. Then she realizes that’s a stupid train of thought and keeps walking. The sun overhead is creating rivers of sweat down Asuka’s back. Her plugsuit is now little more than saggy pants, and her chest is covered only by her gritty hair.

She catches a glimpse of herself in a storefront window and frowns. The bottom lid of the hole where her eye once was is poking out, pink and slimy. The top lid looks like a deflated balloon. She needs an eyepatch, a bandage, something to keep the dust and grime out of her socket.

“Eyepatches are badass.” she tells the thing in the glass. When she snarls, it snarls back. There’s a molar missing, probably knocked out by the impact of the spears. That memory makes her hand and the school of scars on her sternum ache. Death was a relief, because in death she couldn’t hurt anymore. 

Then stupid Rei made stupid Instrumentality happen and she got dragged out of what was possibly the best sleep ever to see Shinji’s dumb face trying to strangle her. Like he had the guts to honestly kill anyone. The minute that dweeby angel showed up he was all tears, unlike Asuka, who didn’t even know who the fuck he was.

At least Kaworu took Shinji away so she could be alone for one goddamn second. And she hasn’t seen a trace of them since-they probably went east. That’s assuming the sun still rises in the same direction. 

Thinking about Shinji pisses her off, so she doesn’t. Instead Asuka breaks into the mini mart and gets to looking. She finds tape and a square bandage, to cover her socket, and she drinks three cans of coffee before tearing into dry ramen noodles and nori. Seeing food again makes her hunger suddenly happen, like her body remembers that it has physical needs.

Logically, then, she must not have laid on the beach as long as she thought-if her body still craves then she would have died from thirst. Or maybe it was some sort of residual Lilith magic. She doesn’t care, stuffing her face with chocolate filled puff candies and peach jellies and dried squid.

Once her bout of gluttony is finished Asuka stuffs a bag full of extra food, steals some flip-flops, and changes into the abandoned uniform behind the counter. Her plugsuit is unceremoniously dumped- Asuka the pilot no longer exists. She died, and survivors don’t die.

 

 _Thwap-thwap. Thwap-thwap._  

“That’s going to get annoying.” Asuka says to herself. No chance of stealth in these shoes. Not that she needs to be stealthy- who’s going to stop her? Everyone besides herself and Shinji seems comfortable being LCL, and it they did reform they wouldn’t be survivors like her and would probably cower in fear. Asuka’s already dead so there’s nothing left to lose.

Then Asuka hears a noise. All pretensions of courage are dropped as she ducks behind a car, hand scrabbling for a piece of rebar. She’s been in combat, yes, but that was inside a hundred foot tall sentient alien cyborg. Now her only defense is whatever her 14 year old body can muster. And she’s missing a large chunk of her vision.

The thing is stepping closer. Her palm has become slippery with sweat.

It’s so close Asuka can hear it breathe. Human then, not angel or EVA. 

She can’t smell them over the stench of LCL. 

Who’d want to hurt the Second Child?

Time dilates as the somebody steps around the car. Asuka screams and throws the rebar, then closes her eye and prepares to flee. 

“Asuka-chan?”

 

 

Hikari Horaki is a survivor. She’s standing in front of Asuka, a red stripe on her forearm where she knocked the rebar to the side. Her school uniform is shredded and her hands and knees are bloodied. There’s a long scrape on the side of her jaw and a fury in her eyes Asuka used to see only when she looked in the mirror.

“I didn’t think you’d come back.” Asuka says. “But if idiot Shinji could make it at the same time I did then it must be pretty easy.”

“Come back? Where were you?”

“In the LCL, duh. Everyone melted after Rei did her Lilith bullshit.” Hikari looks confused, so Asuka shrugs and waves her hand. “You’d have to have been there. Then I reformed and ended up on the beach. But that was totally boring so I’m here now. How about you?”

Hikari is wide eyed and shaky as she recounts her story. “I woke up, and everything smelled like blood, and I thought everyone but me had been crushed. So I climbed as far as I could, and then I went up the stairs, and then I came up here. And I was alone.”

She looks like she’s about to cry. Asuka half hearted wraps an arm around her. Hikari was always the one doing the comforting, not that Asuka ever cried in front of her. But now she’s leaning into Asuka, the first warm thing that isn’t the sun, smelling of sweat and greasy hair.

Shinji’s hands had been cold crimson when he strangled her, and Kaworu was an angel and probably didn’t do human bullshit like sweat. But Hikari is real and unpretentious and has never had the feeling of stabbing something until it dies. She’s a pre-Impact relic of purity.

“I didn’t know you worked for Lucky Eight.” she sniffles.

“I stole it. And some food. Do you want coffee?” Asuka holds up the can and wiggles it in front of Hikari’s face. The other girl takes it and drinks half in a single gulp. As they begin to walk again Asuka hands her a jar of umeboshi.

Asuka doesn’t know where she’s going but Hikari seems confident. She’s probably grown up in Tokyo-3, seeing as her dad worked for NERV and all. And Asuka couldn’t navigate if she tried. Her kanji skills are subpar at best. There wasn’t enough time to learn between the attacks and the hospital and when the school closed she gave up.

“Asuka-chan?” Hikari says. “You said Shinji-kun came back. Where is he?”

“I don’t know and I don’t fucking care. He left with an angel.”

Hikari’s mouth falls open into an O of surprise. “I thought those all died!”

“Yeah. Except for this dude. He’s not dangerous though. Just annoying.” Asuka kicks a piece of concrete. “I mean, he puts up with idiot Shinji. So he can’t be all that murderous.”

“He- he’s human shaped?

“He can pilot an EVA. Those big white ones, those were him. Sort of.” Asuka pulls fish crackers out of her bag and starts munching, hungry again.

Hikari wordlessly takes a few crackers and continues to lead the way. Asuka notices that Hikari’s shoes are worn down so bad you can see her socks. How far did she climb?

They stop in front of an apartment that looks like every other residential building in the city. Hikari kicks in the door, then leads Asuka up six flights of stairs. Inside it’s dark. Part of the stairway is flooded from where someone merged and didn’t get a chance to turn off the sink. It smells like burnt and spoiled food. The large breakfast Asuka had turns in her stomach.

Hikari opens an apartment after feeling the numbers on the door. It’s unlocked. Inside she moves with the smooth practice of something familiar. Asuka looks in the pantry, finding things by scent and sound. From the narrow light of the window the place looks oddly barren. The other two must have taken a lot when they left.

“Asuka-chan, do you want some clothes?” Hikari calls.

“I have clothes.”

“Clothes that fit.” She comes out of her room in a black T-shirt and lounge pants. Her chest is noticeably flattened, and a similar outfit is in her hands. “There’s wipes if you want to clean yourself. And bandages.”

Asuka shuffles into Hikari’s room. A flashlight reveals it’s almost exactly as Asuka remembers it, down to the blue futon. She wipes herself down and puts on the clean clothes. They smell like laundry soap and this one lotion Hikari used to put on her hands. Asuka breathes in deep, but only for a second before the sound of scissors distracts her.

Hikari is chopping her hair off. Terribly. Asuka is no hairdresser, but she knows that cutting hair isn’t like cutting grass. A certain level of finesse is required. And Hikari is snipping like her hair hurt her personally and she wants revenge.

“Hey, idiot-chan, do you want some help? Because that looks like trash.”

“It just needs to be shorter.” Hikari grunts. Once she’s done with the orgy of destruction the entire mess is hidden under a fluffy hat.

“You can’t wear that hat forever.”

”Only you’ll see me, Asuka-chan.” Hikari starts aggressively digging through her chest of drawers. “Where are you planning to go?”

Asuka hasn’t thought about that. Like an old artillery gun there’s no use for her in this peace after the war. She’s spent her entire life on piloting and now has nothing to show for it but scars. Hikari isn’t the relic.

Asuka is.

And after being pushed from the red ocean her life is purposeless. It’s freeing, really. The soldier has laid down her arms and ended the fight. She can do whatever the hell Asuka Langley Soryu wants to do on that particular day and it’ll count as a success. And right now Asuka wants some companionship who isn’t a pilot or an angel or a crazy bastard who’s tried to kill her.

“I’ll just follow you.” Asuka says. She leaves her face plain and open and honest. Hikari nods, and shoulders a school bag she’s refilled with supplies along with an emergency evacuation kit. There’s a bit more packing and grabbing and quick words exchanged before Asuka is following Hikari’s footsteps down the main road of Tokyo-3.

“I’m headed for Neyagawa. Not the old one in Osaka, but the one north of here.” Hikari stops and draws a map in the dirt with her shoe. “If we go over the hills, take the bridge across Ashinoko Lake, then walk through the Kawajiri Forest we’ll end up at Neyagawa’s southern gate.”

“I see.” Asuka murmurs. She has no clue where the fuck any of this is. There are some hills to the northeast, but there are also hills to the east and west and south. She knows because she’s faceplanted into several of them. There’s still twin sets of twin craters from Israfael.

“You might like Neyagawa. It’s very traditional. And I’ve been camping in the Kawajiri Forest.”

“Sounds disgusting. Bugs? Animal shit? No fucking thank you. And traditional is just a code word for super boring. I’ve been to some traditional towns in Germany and they would make an old woman fall asleep.”

“I always forget you’re half German.” Hikari says. “Your spoken Japanese is very good, even if your writing is abysmal.”

“Quarter German. My dad’s American. I’ve been there, too. People there don’t understand the meaning of personal space and all the good stuff ended up underwater but they thought I was funny.”

“But you are funny.” Hikari stops and grabs Asuka’s hand. “And you can be nice, too. You just don’t want to show it.”

“Pilots don’t have time to be nice. I had a job to do. Now I don’t.”

“You do have a job. Carrying our stuff.”

“Oh, so I’m a glorified pack mule?”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little hard work, as my dad used to say. Sometimes you even learn something.” She drops Asuka’s hand and keeps walking.

They make slow but steady progress across the city. Despite the destruction most roads are still passable, or have side alleys that skirt the worst sections. When Asuka first arrived Tokyo-3 had seemed enormous but as she walks it seems to grow smaller and smaller. They’re in sight of the train station by late afternoon, and as the moon rises the two step foot outside city limits.

“There’s a bus stop up ahead we could sleep at.” Hikari says. “My futon is rolled up in your bag. It’ll be like camping without a tent.”

“I already said I don’t do camping. Isn’t there somebody’s house we could borrow or something?”

“We’re not committing crime we don’t have to. You can sleep perfectly fine on the ground.”

Asuka sighs in frustration but accepts the situation as Hikari spreads the futon over a tarp that was inside the evacuation kit. It also contains a wind up lantern, the type she’s heard was popular in the years immediately following Second Impact. She’s never known that kind of struggle personally, but in America her relatives spoke of the three H’s: hunger, heat, and hopelessness.

Laying in the dark listening to someone crank a light is one of those situations that’s nostalgic without having ever experienced it. Asuka could have been in this situation a thousand times before, in spirit if not in body. But she has laid next to Hikari several times before.

The other girl is pulling herself out of the chest-flattening thing that is too tight to be properly called a bra. The plugsuit had been mildly constricting, but it also had ribbing and an extended section in the bust that had made her look sexy. Like an adult woman and not a pretty little girl. In the baggy clothes and flattener Hikari looks like a slouchy boy. She’s been using “boku” again too.

“Hikari-chan, do you wanna be a guy or something?” Asuka asks.

Hikari drops the lantern in surprise.

 

 

There’s a moment of total silence, which now that the cicadas are gone is deafening. Asuka can see Hikari’s stricken face by moonlight, her eyes wide in fear like a deer’s. Her arms move to cross her chest, her knees draw in to cover her vulnerable ribs, and her chin drops. She’s a little hedgehog curled up on the edge of the blanket.

“If you wanna be a guy that’s weird, but everything is goddamn weird now. There’s a big dead girl in the fucking bay.”

Hikari blinks her big liquid eyes. “... y-yes.”

“Huh. Never thought you’d be the type. You’re not much of a tomboy. And I thought you liked dudes.”

“I do.” Hikari whispers. “I’m gay.”

“So you like girls? I was going to sleep next to you!”

“No, I like boys. I’m a boy who likes boys. So I’m gay.”

“Then why do you want to be a guy? That’s something only super-dykes do.”

Hikari smacks her fist onto the futon. “Because I goddamn am one!” Se’s got fat frustrated tears sliding down her  face as she continues. “My dad says it’s okay to be a girl, that I need to accept it, that I’m such a beautiful talented hardworking daughter and I hate it! I’ve been made to pretend to be a good girl for too many years. I want to fucking quit. I’m not a girl and I never was.”

Asuka can’t breathe from shock as Hikari cries for the second time this day.

They don’t talk again that night; Asuka decides she’d rather sleep on the bus stop bench than on the futon. She doesn’t think Hikari would do anything while she’s sleeping but there’s a rawness between them too painful to touch.

 _Hikari-chan wants to be a boy._ Asuka thinks. _Hikari-chan isn’t Hikari-chan. The person on that futon is a complete stranger._

There’s a lone cricket, far in the distance. It’s the first sign of wildlife since Asuka was reborn. She doesn’t know how the seas will fare, but maybe as people come back they’ll be cleaned. The fish will be lost forever, as will the whales and the gulls and the sharks. So the ocean will be sterile blue like the sky it reflects. And there are other smaller bodies of water where LCL fell, like the NERV caven’s basin. Those places will be sterilized as well.

That’s how she feels. Emptied out. How was someone going to just go and say something like that? Girls were born that way, like how boys were. Boys were dumb and rough and stupid, not nice and helpful like Hikari Horaki. That’s why she couldn’t be one. Although, if she was a gay guy, that might be alright. Gay dudes were kind of flouncy and girly anyways. How would a real gay man fall in love with her though?

Asuka decides to quit thinking. It’s none of her concern.

In the morning they share dried fish and a bottle of water, passing it between them with no regard for saliva. Briefly Asuka’s mind registers it as an indirect kiss, but that passes when she sees the annoyance in Hikari’s face.

“I get that you’re a guy now, Horaki-kun. But it’s still weird. I got used to Hikari-chan.”

“If you want, you can call me Hideo-chan.” He gets up and starts re-rolling the futon. “That’s my new name.”

“But- but you’re not my boyfriend, idiot-kun. That’s a really sappy name that some lovesick dumbass uses.”

“You used chan before. I’m still the same person. I can still call you Asuka-chan.”

“No, now that you’re a boy you have to call me Soryu-san.”

“I’m the same person whose bed you slept on and whose food you ate, Asuka-chan. Now you just know the truth.”

“But what will idiot Touji think about me calling you that?”

Hideo stands up and starts walking away. “Touji-kun isn’t a boy. At least, I don’t think he is. And he likes girls anyways.”

“So why’d you make him lunch and love on him if you knew you were a boy? That’s kinda sad, idiot-chan. Pining after someone who can never love you back.” Asuka jogs after Hideo. “Hey, I said why be in love with someone who can’t love you back?”

“Why’d you kiss Shinji?” Hideo says. “Shinji will never be that real man you want because Shinji never even was a man in the first place.”

“Is anybody their fucking real gender?” Asuka yells. “Oh don’t tell me idiot Kensuke-“

“Why is that such a problem?” Hideo interrupts. “Are any of us trying to make you trans?”

“No, but then I might start thinking I’m a fucking boy too. Then we’ll all be one big weird transsexual commune milking cows for pennies. Every time someone comes out of the LCL we’ll spin a wheel to give them a new gender and hand them a bucket. And then I’ll have to kiss girls and kiss boys and kiss, oh I don’t know, something that isn’t either-“

“-they’re called nonbinary, Asuka-chan-“

“-goddamnit all to hell can’t anything be normal anymore?”

Hideo doesn't say anything, instead letting out a long low whistle from between his teeth. “You’ve been saving that one up for a while, haven’t you?”

Asuka didn’t answer, as at her center she is suddenly blazingly mad. Her survivors resolve turns and flees as she suddenly wants to go throw herself off something or go underwater or just bang her head really hard against a concrete block until she passes out. If everybody around her is changing their gender like it was their hair color then what’s the point of gender in the first place?

Hideo is half-smiling in a mysterious way at Asuka that pisses her off even more than before. “I think that sounds wonderful. A place where everyone can be themselves without shame.”

“But some people are freaks. Like those perverts who put on women’s clothing and jack off. Do I have to accept them too?”

“If they aren’t hurting anyone, why should you be upset?”

“Because it’s fucking weird.”

“You just said that everything is, quote, goddamn weird now. There’s a giant dead girl in the bay, Asuka-chan.”

“Fuck you.” Asuka says. She dives off the path into the tall grass and goes running.

 

Asuka realizes she doesn’t have a plan after about twenty minutes. She’s hot, lost, and cut up. The tall grass had little teeth that sliced at her legs, and the bag she grabbed was the one that held only the futon and canned coffee. She drinks two cans and then chucks them into the grass. Fuck the environment. It was all shit anyways from Second Impact.

Asuka was in her castle tower for that catastrophe, the brilliant little princess with a queen gone mad and a king who was fucking the chambermaid. It amuses her to think of Stiefmutter cleaning shit out of pans and mopping up vomit. She probably won’t reform, as Vater would never have the strength to, and that woman is like a brainless doll the way she follows him. Asuka’s a doll? Only because she got dressed up and posed and sat in a strange doll-mama’s lap like her real mother wasn’t babbling nonsense in a NERV owned hospital.

She was a raven. Asuka thinks. Stiefmutter was a big black raven sent to steal the princess while the queen’s back was turned. And the bitch succeeded!

Asuka suddenly remembers idly flipping through a dictionary and seeing Mutterkuchen, wondering what kind of baked good that was before finding out it was the placenta. Afterbirth. She’d been disgusted at the idea of naming a fat bloody sack of flesh anything so quaint sounding. But that’s what her body is, isn’t it? A sack of flesh. The stinking thing that hides you from nirvana.

Asuka feels sick again.

Mutterkuchen. Maternity ward. Menstruation. These are the things which disgust Asuka and smell of LCL. Not the clean, sharp, iron scent of real blood- no, these smell of blood contaminated by other fluids and tissues. It had a stench that stuck to Asuka’s body after she piloted. When her period came it came with a recurring dream, where she gave birth to her own red EVA. And the EVA was filled with the blood that is LCL. And the oceans are now LCL, meaning they are also afterbirth and amniotic fluid and menses and that is why Asuka could not stand to be under those waves.

She flops down on the grass and wonders what she’ll do if she starts bleeding again. It’s a traitor, an irregular annoyance that leaves her ready to die from the pain and disgust. Her body betrayed her. It said “be an adult”, and her figure filled out and her libido sprung into awkward existence and she bled at the worst moments. Stiefmutter said it was just part of being a woman. But Hideo-chan still has periods, probably, and he’s a boy now. To him it’s just a weird bodily function.

“I still don’t get it.” Asuka whispers into the sky. A cicada is buzzing somewhere. If what she remembers is right, that’s their mating call. Angels were attacking and the world was ending and those bugs were screaming “FUCK ME” at the tops of their lungs. It seems thematically appropriate.

“It’s not on you to understand.” the voice of Rei Ayanami says behind her. Asuka flips around and sees the wunderkind herself. Asuka’s not sure how Rei even got here but she’s floating, the grass fanning away from her feet to show how they dangle above the ground.

“Do you still have that angel bullshit?” Asuka asks.

“I was always an Angel.” Rei says. “Adam took the Third Child. So I will take the Second. It’s fitting, isn’t it? The first and the last. The beginning and the end. Artificially made bookends.”

“Spare me.” Asuka groans. “And what am I not supposed to understand?”

“How people identify. I myself have come to embrace a gender separate from male and female, as my soul is both a mother and a father.”

“Angels don’t have gender. They’re just ugly.”

“And I contain the soul of an Angel in the body of a human. There is a conflict between my soul and my body. This is what causes me to change my gender. Hideo has the soul of a man, so he seeks to change his body so that others see that soul.”

Asuka couldn’t argue back. Rei’s explanation made sense, and as a being who could dissolve you to just your soul they’d know the most about them.

“Could you turn me back into LCL?” Asuka asks.

lowers their eyes to look at an ant crawling up a blade of grass. “I could, if I so choose. But I will not.” Their eyes rise back up and tighten with anger. “Going back now would be regression. You cannot return to the womb.”

“I was just asking, Jesus. And what womb? News flash, genius: the only uterus I’ve ever come out of is my mom’s.”

“The EVA is an artificial womb, the womb of Kyoko Soryu as a Mother. The Sea of Souls is a massive womb, the metaphorical womb of Lilith.”

Asuka flips out. “So you’re my fucking mom?”

“I am in the sense that Lilith is the mother of all-“

“I don’t need a third fucking mom! I have a crazy mom and a doll mom and now I have a crazy alien doll mom- fuck this bullshit, I quit.”

Asuka rolls over and presses her face into the warm dirt. She knows that Rei is watching, probably amused by her little temper tantrum like the smug bitch they are. Rei probably doesn’t even understand. They’ve never had a mother.

“I wouldn’t like to be called a mother anyways.” Rei says. They sit seiza next to Asuka, their hand hovering over Asuka’s hair. “Like my name, my gender is null. A blank spot in the binary. And mother implies womanhood. That designation does not fit well on either of our shoulders.”

“You trying to say something about me?” Asuka growls. “What, I’m suddenly not a girl because I’m not some pretty proper thing?”

“No.” Rei put their hand on Asuka’s back, rubbing it in small circles. “I saw your soul, Soryu-san. It is simply not the shape you expect. I will let you realize that shape for yourself.” They stand and begins to glow. “For now, I think it’s best you go apologize to Horaki-san.”

The two figures flash and disappear.

 

Hideo screams and drops the lantern when Asuka and Rei appear before him. Thankfully, Rei’s angel bullshit allows them to catch the lantern in telepathic hands and lower it to safety.

“I found Rei,” Asuka says.

“I found Soryu-san,” Rei says. “She has something she’d like to tell you.”

 _Bitch._ Asuka thinks. She turns to Hideo with a look of what she hopes is solemn apology. “I’m sorry for saying rude things to you and running away. You’re right and I should accept weirdos, especially since they’re all that’s left.”

Rei opens their mouth to complain but Hideo hugs Asuka with such force she couldn’t hear anything if she tried. She hugs back, just a little, and things seem to be okay.

Things are not, however, okay.

Rei and Hideo are being _friends_.

“I’ve never seen a shrine before,” Rei says. “I wasn’t allowed to leave Tokyo-3 without a chaperone, and Gendo Ikari wasn’t interested in that sort of thing.” They blink and stare up towards the sun. “I’m not even used to being outside.”

“It’s not the full outdoor experience without bugs, I say.” Hideo digs through one of his packs. “This is a wildlife guide. That way if you see anything you can know its name.”

Rei takes the book, which is small and childish and colorful. “Does… does this have the name of those gray birds which populated the city?”

“Those are rock pigeons. They’re in the section with the blue tab. Now that we’re outside the city there’ll be bush warblers and willow tits and sparrows.”

Asuka only vaguely recognizes the words Hideo is using, but guesses that they all describe boring looking little brown birds only distinguishable by the color of the feathers next to their eyeballs or whatever. She doesn’t have time for ornithology or Rei flipping through a children’s book with an intense expression on their face.

“-and when we get to Lake Ashinoko there’ll be frogs in the reeds. Have you ever seen a frog, Rei-chan?”

“No.”

“Oh, they’re just so cute! And then when we’re out on the bridge you can look for the carp. Have you ever heard the legend of the dragon carp?”

Asuka continues to tune Hideo and Rei out. It’s less a conversation and more Hideo explaining things everybody in the world except Wunderkind knows. Although in a society of three people having a third of your population be dumb as hell is a definite handicap. And the day is pleasant. They pass little roadside shrines as they walk and Hideo explains what they mean, Asuka listening in- she’s never heard of kami and bodhisattvas before.

Rei stops in front of a rough wooden box that holds a statue of a grinning old man with extremely large earlobes.

“Who’s that?” they ask.

“That’s Jizo-san,” Hideo says. “He is the protector of children and travelers. Back in Tokyo-3 many people called upon him to protect you. And you too, Asuka-chan.”

Rei squats down to peer at the statue’s face. “Strangers wanted to protect me?”

“You were their hope,” Hideo murmurs. “When you’re in a dark shelter swaying from battle all that’s left is praying.”

Asuka almost opens her mouth to object, but then she remembers her prayers as she lay dying- _let it end let it end mama protect me don't leave me i’m scared HELP ME_ -and her judgement fades. Let the people of the past have their hope.

At noon they find a sunflower field. The flowers are enormous, yellow like Asuka’s favorite dress and cool against her lips and cheeks when they brush by. It wouldn’t be bad if her depth perception wasn’t utterly screwed. Out on the road, things were fine-it was long and straight and unchanging. But in the randomness of a field Asuka is getting slapped left and right by pointy seed spirals.

“Are you alright, Asuka-chan?” Hideo asks.

“Fine. Just hard to walk through all these–* _slap*_ –FUCKING FLOWERS with only one eye.”

“Then take off the bandage, silly.”

Rei speaks up. “Soryu-san means that she has only one working eye. It has changed her depth perception and now she cannot avoid obstacles.”

“Thanks for that explanation, Doctor Obvious.” Asuka smacks a gnat away from her face. “And these little flies are awful.”

“Those are gnats,” Rei says. “They are on page 15 of the wildlife guide. That’s in the section with the orange tab.”

“You actually lost an eye!? When?” Hideo is peering at Asuka’s face, trying to look under her makeshift eyepatch. Asuka rips it off, pulling her bottom lid down for good measure.

“When I was fighting in my EVA. Bastard stabbed it right through.”

Hideo shrieks. “That’s disgusting! Cover it up, Asuka-chan!”

“Nyeh nyeh, you asked.” Asuka comes running at Hideo, her hand half cupped around the socket so it doesn’t get poked by a stupid flower. Hideo flees. Asuka keeps up the pursuit until her feet suddenly aren’t on the ground.

“Stop trampling the flowers,” Rei says. They’ve got Asuka and Hideo in some sort of Angel tractor beam, pulling the two of them back together. “Soryu-san, please replace your eyepatch. Horaki-san, please don’t call Soryu-san disgusting.”

Asuka tapes a fresh piece of gauze on her face, waving Hideo away when he tries to help. The three decide to take lunch, as it’s too hot to travel at this time of day and they’re all hungry as hell. Hideo passes out the food, and Rei makes Asuka wait until they all bow their heads and say that one phrase she can never remember the meaning of. Then it’s a fest of tearing open packages and cracking open cans, as Hideo says they should eat the “fake” food now.

“Once we get out in the forest I can make a fire to boil the rice, and that guidebook has a section on edible plants.” He delicately dips a cracker in fish sauce. “Since it’s summer all the time there might even be fruit.”

“So we’re going to be eating weeds and berries,” Asuka says as she eats her fourth piece of bread. “Why couldn’t we have lived in the convenience store? There was enough ramen for an army.”

“Because it’s good for the spirit to be out here,” Hideo replies. “Nature soothes the savage beast.”

Asuka rolls her eyes but does not reply.

Shaded by the sunflowers and full of melon bread Asuka feels herself dozing off. Rei has already fallen asleep, having explained that their Angel abilities drained them very quickly in their human body. Hideo is laying at Asuka’s side watching the clouds roll by.

Asuka feels something tightening her chest as she watches Hideo breathe. He’s taken his binder off, and there are red angry lines on his exposed shoulder where it must have cut in. Asuka wonders if they hurt. Is the pain worth a flat chest? She’s tempted to try the thing on, to return to that boy-breasted state she hasn’t had for six years.

But it’s Hideo’s, and she doesn’t think he’d want to share. And he’s much smaller than she is, chestwise. She’s been too curvy for her own good since she went to college and boys twice her age were staring- hips, tits, and ass, that’s all Asuka was to them. An object to masturbate over but never to have her own voice. A sex doll.

Oh, but didn’t she try and make them look? Leaned over in low cut dresses and little shorts to try and catch their eyes? Flirted and flipped her hair and let her tongue slide around popsicles and lollipops in a way that was supposed to be sexy but just ended with sticky spit on her hands? She was a whore, Stiefmutter said, a trashy whore who needed to learn to shut her legs.

The only kiss she’d ever had was with Shinji, and that’s the farthest she’d ever gone. Forget the bases, Asuka wasn’t even in the fucking ballpark. She sighs and lays her head back on the warm earth, not asleep but not awake, and has visions of centerfold girls who all have her face.

When Hideo rouses them all awake it’s almost late afternoon, but he says that if they keep a good speed they’d be able to make camp within distance of Ashinoko Lake. So Asuka and Rei follow him. He didn’t bother to put his binder back on, and Asuka is focusing on a point above his head, ashamed for no reason by his chest that she’s seen a million times before.

“Hey, Wunderkind, why can’t you just fly us to Neyagawa?” Asuka snaps after a locust hops on her foot like she’s wheat or something.

“Sometimes it’s about the journey,” Rei says. “I enjoy walking. I have seen many new things. And I enjoy company. Horaki-san is very knowledgeable about this area.”

“But what if you get tired?”

“Then I will rest.” Rei points at a spray of white flowers. “What is that plant?”

“That’s ginger,” Hideo says. “But not like the kind you eat with sushi. This kind just has nice flowers. And you can squeeze the sap out of its buds to drink.”

“Alright, nature boy,” Asuka says. “Aren’t”t we going to a lake? That’s a whole bunch of water right fucking there. Just get a straw and _sluuuuuuurp._ ” Asuka makes an obnoxious sucking noise to go with her statement.

“If you want to get intestinal parasites, go ahead,” Hideo replies. “Me and Rei-chan will be taking care with our water.”

“Doesn’t everything outside have some kind of infectious disease?” Asuka kicks a rock. “Like that rock right there, it could give me leprosy because nothing is actually fucking clean.”

“It is full of life,” Rei says. “Everything around us contains living beings. We are not alone.”

“You’ve got a deep mind,” Hideo says, and for a second he leans into Rei’s shoulder before they pull away looking flustered and Asuka is suddenly livid.

Hideo is _hers_ , she thinks before she realizes what kind of thought that is. It’s yet another thought in a long series of ones that day that make her uncomfortable in ways she can’t explain.

Switching gender. Weirdos. The stinking sack which hides you from nirvana. EVA-02.

A man in his 20’s watching her hips swing as she walks. Hideo-chan, you’re not my boyfriend!

You cannot return to the womb. EVA is the throne of her soul. EVA is her mother. Did her mother want a son?

EVA is the Devil in the shape of a woman. Womanhood is to be possessed by the Devil. She is told it means she will bleed and not die. An angry non-consensual wound. Her EVA bleeds alongside her. Her EVA is a uterus that contains the amniotic fluid and the Mutterkuchen and the fetus-Asuka.

At nine she wished her breasts would just disappear. It’s puberty, every woman just tolerates it. It’s not so bad. Stop crying. You think you’re the only girl who’s ever gone through this? When you get curvy the boys like you. I see them look at you. They don’t want skinny girls flat like themselves.

She wants to be flat like Hideo. She wants to shave her head and scream. She wants to sterilize herself and make her body a bloodless wasteland. She wants something different to lay between her legs.

_Then why do you want to be a guy?_

_Because I goddamn am one!_

Asuka sees the red eye of Rei peer at her and realizes that they’ve known all along.

She/he throws a rock across the lake, not wanting to turn back to where Rei and Hideo are building a fire. Asuka (or whatever his/her name is now) feels upside down. Third Impact was less of a shock than this. At least during that her sense of identity was stable, the gyroscope which let her keep her mind. Now he seems to have lost it, absolutely lost it, and behind him Hideo is laughing like Asuka isn’t melting into a pool of red wax.

The bell toned chirps of a cricket are ringing out from the grass around him. He feels sunburnt and exposed. His body is an abomination, now. He can’t picture a single minute more in it. One life to live and he’s been saddled with this thing which he cannot leave that disgusts him more by the minute. He wants it to stop. He wants to have never been born.

There’s a soft feeling behind him that makes him turn his head.

“You are not a being who should die,” Rei says. They are glowing a warm white. “Seeing the shape of your soul is terrifying. But it is an invocation to keep living.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Asuka yells. Hideo looks up from his fire, but Asuka ignores him.

“Because you wouldn’t have believed me.” They sit beside him. “But I did put the suggestion in your head. That’s why you realized it so quickly.”

“Is everything alright?” Hideo asks.

“I’ve joined the weirdos club,” Asuka says. “Where’s the line to get an undercut?”

“I’m not following.”

“I realized I’m like you. I want to be a guy. I just repressed it or fucking whatever.”

Hideo looks like he’s been slapped with a fish. “Are you serious?”

“No, I’m fucking God. Of course I’m serious.” Asuka turns to Rei. “Wunderkind, am I serious?”

“Yes.”

Hideo scratches his choppy hair. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that it’s all a bit sudden. But I don’t think anybody would have ever guessed I was trans. So I understand.” He grins. “You’re welcome to join the transsexual dairy commune now.”

Asuka flops back on the grass. “Don’t remind me .”

Beside the two Rei is grabbing fish out of the lake with her bare hands.

 

Dinner was nice enough. Hideo grilled Rei’s fish and boiled rice in a bucket she’d stolen from an abandoned bait shop. There were even pickled carrots and cucumbers to go with it.

“The shop smelled awful,” Hideo says. “The minnows died in their tanks and now it smells like fish sauce gone wrong.”

“Are the worms alright?” Rei asks. “They could be freed to improve the soil.”

“Since when were you a farmer?” Asuka spits a pinbone into the fire. “Dirt is dirt. Shit grows or it doesn’t.”

“Canned food will not last forever. And without the thousands it takes to run the system you once used to eat will not work.” Rei pops another chunk of carrot into her mouth. “The only interference I did was to turn the nuclear power plants off.”

“Oh shit, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Hideo says. “And what about the dead people who haven’t gotten buried yet? What about the planes! Rei, if a plane comes, you’ve gotta catch it with your powers.”

“Uh, after the Angel that dropped fucking space bombs I think people quit flying so much.” Asuka rolls his eyes. “Besides, it’d be fucking funny if we went through all that and got hit by a plane. It’s dramatic irony.”

“I don’t think you understand what irony is.” Rei sips their drink in a way that implies both contempt and public shaming. Quite frankly, it pisses Asuka off. But he’s turned over a new leaf of tolerance, so he doesn’t do anything to Rei except put a cricket on their part of the futon. The dumbass bug, however, has other plans and jumps on Hideo, who screams and hits Asuka in the face with his flailing.

It isn't a very restful night. And when they wake up Asuka is sideways, Rei has rolled ten feet away in their sleep, and Hideo looks half suffocated under all of the sheets and abandoned clothes Rei and Asuka shucked off while half conscious. He practically shoves them all into the lake with a bottle of shampoo and gives vivid threats before scrubbing their musty clothes out over the rocks. It’s like laundry brings out the assertive class president side he’s always had.

“She says we’ll be meeting her at the cabin before the woods,” Rei says while drip-drying on a rock.

“Who?” Hideo asks. “And does she need her clothes washed?”

“Ikari-san and my other half. And I think they’ve got clothes covered.”

“Shinji-kun is now Shinji-chan?” Asuka thinks there must be something in the LCL turning all the pilots trans. “And who’s your other half? Somebody with a personality?”

“Nagisa-san. She was your replacement. And an Angel, born of Adam and yet Adam.”

“Adam is a boy.”

“Not if she doesn’t want to be,” Hideo says. “That’s just how it works. Is the sky red if I call it red? Is this lake an ocean if I call it one? Are you a girl just because your name is Asuka?”

“Have you recently had thoughts of depression or suicide?” Asuka mimics back in a high pitched voice. “You sound like my damn therapist.”

“Psychiatry is a prison,” Rei mumbles as they lift another fish out of the water.

“No, it keeps the whack jobs away from us normal people. Don’t think you’re smart just because you’ve read three words of Foucault.”

Privately Asuka admits that he’s also never read more than three words of Foucault, but he heard plenty of memes from the philosophy students during university. He quit hanging out with them after they refused to give him a fake ID or weed or anything fun. Then he had no friends.

Maybe his constant drive towards hedonism was a sign of something. But that’s entirely too much self reflection for one day. He needs to go find something to be mean about before he resolves to make meaningful life changes or some bullshit like that.

“You’re coming with us to the commune, Asuka-chan. You’re a weirdo like the rest of us.” Hideo snaps the water out of a shirt and gently folds it. “Maybe you can give the cows psychoanalysis so we can separate out the weird ones.”

“Will we eat the cows?” Rei asks. “They have such gentle eyes.”

“It’s a dairy farm, so not unless you want to. And I agree! Cows are the cutest kind of animal.”

“This is the most inane conversation I’ve ever fucking heard, and I lived with Shinjidiot.” Asuka fans himself with a broad ginkgo leaf.

Hideo doesn’t respond, but the next fish that Rei lifts lands square in Asuka’s face.


End file.
